I'm sure this applies to other countries too. Notice the term "otherness" as was referenced in the thread about how political groups view each other. I'm sure it's not a coincidence, but a commentary on how things are viewed in today's world. "If you're not with us, you're against us......so screw you" sort of mentality.

Religious Canadians bend morals for the almighty buck: study

Do unto others — so long as you recognize them from church.

Incongruous as it sounds, a new Canadian study discovers that the more importance people place on religion, the more likely they are to lie for financial gain. The lead researcher hypothesizes that this “really strange effect” is the result of the faithful feeling less kinship with the secular, and ultimately less concern about screwing them over for a few bucks.
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The study — to appear in the December issue of the journal Economics Letters — draws on 400 people randomly separated into pairs. The “sender” in each coupling was given two payments: either $5 and $7 (“small return” group) or $5 and $15 (“large return” group).

Senders were told to send a message to their partner — a “receiver” in another room — informing them about which of the two amounts was higher, and the receiver would then choose which one to take (generally, the larger one).

Lying, however, would mean the sender wound up with the bigger payoff.

Sex, age, grade-point average, student debt, socioeconomic status and even the size of the return had no real impact on the decision to lie. But area of study, the marital status of the sender’s parents, and importance placed on religion all made a difference, with the latter being the most surprising to researchers.

“We had them rate the importance of religion on a scale, and as they went up each point on that scale, they became about four per cent more likely to lie,” said Childs, who proposes that the predominantly secular university population played a role in religious students’ decision to defy a key tenet of their faith (the most common religions on campus are Judaism, Islam and Christianity, all preaching honesty as a virtue).
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“My suspicion is that they feel like the receiver isn’t part of their group, and that creates a feeling of otherness. That otherness leads to feelings of detachment that can increase willingness to lie.”
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The good news is that nearly half the study’s participants opted to tell the truth, even though the experimental design ensured their anonymity, and thus no consequences to lying beyond a guilty conscience.

“That, to me, was pretty remarkable,” Childs said. “People are dishonest far less often than we think

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/natio ... story.html